Agency Roles and Responsibilities

Life in an Agency: Agency Roles and Responsibilities

When we talk about roles in an agency, we're actually discussing types of jobs. In a chaotic environment where clients are gods and deadlines are doomsdays, the lines between these jobs become blurred.

It's not uncommon for one person to perform more than one role and for a group of people to juggle the same role between them. What matters is that the job gets done right within a specific time frame.

Define “done right” and “specific time frame”. To do this, we need to take a few steps back and talk about client relationships, team coordination, and time management.

1. Client Acquisition and Communication

The primary responsibility of the Sales team is to find new clients and present to them the benefits of working together. In the digital industry, recommendations are, more often than not, how new clients enter the stage. Agencies rarely have a Salesperson on their team, and this role is usually taken over by the agency's owner or Account Manager.

Speaking of Account Managers, their role is the most important one in the scene playing out after the initial contact with a client: negotiation and maintaining constant communication.

2. Project Initiation [Scope and Staffing]

Clients usually walk in with specific requests and ideas. The Account Managers have to define them as precisely as possible to estimate the project correctly and create an accurate quote.

Then, it's the team's job to assess if they're able to execute the project and by when. If the project in question is larger than anything they've done before, it might be necessary to hire an extra pair of hands.

This is where HR steps in and helps out with the process. An important issue to solve is whether to hire people full-time or to collaborate with freelancers or other agencies.

In our interviews, we've come across several companies that consist of only two people. They take on a project, complete the tasks they're qualified for, and outsource the rest to freelancers they regularly work with. This way, they become clients themselves!

One of the best practices is sending the client a statement of work where you define the project's scope in detail. Once they approve it, a deal is made, and the agency can begin working on its tasks.

3. Project Management—the Main Act

Although each company tends to organize itself in different ways, Project Managers are the ones who, by definition, take over managing projects, just as their job title suggests. Their main goal is to ensure the team doesn't stray away from the scope and deliver the requested service on time.

The first step is to break down the project into smaller pieces that are easier to handle. The larger the project, the more significant is this first step because without it, chaos takes over. Depending on the complexity, several stages are formed, a timeline, and dependencies between various tasks. Most Project Managers use tools such as project management apps to help them out throughout this process. In the old days, blackboards, paper charts, and spreadsheets were used for this purpose. Thankfully, technology and progress led to solutions that make life easier by automating time-consuming busywork.

The execution stage can begin when the project's phases are defined, broken down further into tasks, and assigned to specific people.

The creatives take over and do their magic.
Let's imagine a project. The client needs an app and its website created and promoted. This request calls for professionals in several different fields of expertise.

For starters, the designers need to create an initial concept for the app and the website. If the client likes it, the developers take a look from a technical side and give their feedback on what can be done and what needs to change. It's very common for misunderstandings and conflicts to arise in this exchange of opinions. "The lifelong battle between designers and developers" is a known issue in the industry, and there's yet no certain one-size-fits-all recipe for resolving it.

While the entire app and website are built, writers and graphic designers create the necessary content. Brands usually have a tone of voice and visual style already defined, but if they don't, or the client wants to rebrand, the guidelines are formed in close cooperation with them. These brand guidelines are then applied to every sentence, statement, and image.

4. Project Setbacks

All goes well until it doesn't. For each of the previously described phases, a myriad of setbacks can occur. Every completed milestone of the project requires the client's approval, and the delay of their feedback pushes back the project's development, threatening its deadlines.

This is the most frequent issue agencies deal with. Entire teams bend over backward to meet their deadlines, just to get no reply from their clients for weeks. Left in the dark, not knowing if what's delivered needs alterations, agencies turn to other projects and their deadlines. While they're engaged working on them, clients from previously completed projects swoop in asking for design changes.

Meanwhile, team members take days off, go on vacations and maternity/paternity leaves, or quit. Assignments need to be redistributed, new employees recruited and onboarded, paperwork sorted.

People often think it's clear who needs to do what. They believe it's implied who will edit a document, code, or image, by when, and in what way. Once they realize nothing is done how they imagined it, frustration and confusion ensue.

5. Taming the Agency Life Chaos

All these timelines, information mismatches, and difficulties with clients are managed and organized by Account Managers and Project Managers. Sometimes, they cooperate with Scrum Masters or Agile Coaches. But ultimately, Project Managers are the ones who pull invisible strings to make everything happen on time, as the client requested.

Established techniques and tools are the faithful assistants of our heroes. Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches are the masters of methodologies. They make sure meetings are held regularly and that any roadblocks or misunderstandings are removed from the path of completing tasks. Our interviews revealed that agencies rarely employ Scrum Masters or Agile Coaches and seldom use methodologies to organize their teams. They're aware of the existence of agile principles and try to stick to them, but they mostly don't use them and try to make it through the week the best way possible.

Instead, managers resort to project management tools to help them tame the chaos. Some of the agency owners we talked to said tools like ActiveCollab helped them put the entire workflow in order.

By dividing the workload and assigning individual pieces of the puzzle, there are no more misunderstandings as each team member knows what to do.
Communicating with clients is more transparent when one doesn't have to dig through email threads and answer phone calls at odd times.

When faced with delayed feedback or urgent demands, Project and Account Managers can show their clients precisely what the teams' workload and a project's timeline look like. One of our customers said he lets his clients see the ripple effect a late reply can create: one week of silence could postpone a project's milestone for a month!

6. Project Invoicing and Client Retention

When everything is said and done, the project is finally delivered and the curtain is brought down. The team can breathe a sigh of relief while the managers wrap up the deal with the client. Depending on the arrangement, any tweaks or additional requests can be charged extra.

The final act is, of course, invoicing and payment. Some companies and freelancers agree upon a fixed budget per project, while others charge by the hour. Both methods carry the same weak spot: will the client pay? And when? Will they agree to the extra charges? Account Managers, Project Managers, and even business owners need to deal with these questions.

One of our interviewees told us how his agency solved the problem of late payments: their clients pay half up front and the rest once the project is finished. This way, both parties are committed to a successful deal.